The Interstellar Platypus
by Omnicat
Summary: Laying eggs is hard when you're almost entirely mammal, but that's what modern medicine was invented for. Or: almost nine months ago, Rey put an egg in Ben. Today they'll celebrate having successfully gotten it out, whether Ben can stay awake for it or not.


**Title:** The Interstellar Platypus

**Author:** Omnicat

**Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** J.J. Abrams & co's _Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens_ and Rian Johnson & co's _Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi_. Maybe the Wookiepedia page on bacta.

**Warnings: **Medical stuff, Ben being a masochistic idiot, crack treated seriously.

**Characters & Relationships:** Rey x Ben & their unhatched egg-baby.

**Summary:** Laying eggs is hard when you're almost entirely mammal, but that's what modern medicine was invented for. Or: almost nine months ago, Rey put an egg in Ben. Today they'll celebrate having successfully gotten it out, whether Ben can stay awake for it or not. **/ 1569 words**

**Author's Note:** Enjoy!

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

**The Interstellar Platypus**

By the time Rey made her way back to Ben, their egg nestled snugly in the crook of her arm, he had been stitched up and moved to the recuperating room, no longer lying on the hover-gurney, but soaking in a postpartum bacta bath. With his head lolling back and his arms splayed out over the gently sloped edge, he looked incongruously, almost comically, relaxed.

He was already looking her way when she entered. Though his eyes were glassy and his presence in the back of her mind felt loopy with painkillers, he reached for her at once. For _them_.

For Rey and their unborn daughter.

No – she was out of Ben's body now, so in a sense, she had been 'born'. 'Unhatched' was probably a better word... hilarious as that thought was, by now.

"Look who I have here," Rey singsonged, bounding up to the bath. She couldn't keep a painfully large smile off her face.

Ben didn't quite have the energy to reciprocate, though he made a valiant effort to think gratitude and relief at her. When Rey settled beside him on the wide, slip-proof edge of the bath, he wrapped both of his big hands around the egg in her lap. It was, reassuringly, roughly the size of the average newborn. Ben easily covered over half of its surface with his hands.

Frowning, he plucked at the soft, pale yellow sleeve the medidroid had slipped it into.

"What is this?" he asked, only barely slurring.

"A heat blanket. So you won't have to be a broody hen and sit on her for the next however many weeks. And it monitors her development and vital signs. If she doesn't hatch on her own, the sensors will tell us when it's time to break her out." She slapped his fingers away. "Leave it."

He looked faintly disturbed. "I'd crush her if I sat on her."

"Exactly," Rey said, grinned, and pressed a kiss to the crown of his hair.

That mollified him. He repositioned himself gingerly in the warm bacta, curling one arm around Rey's legs and laying his head down on his bicep, nose to shell with their daughter. His other hand took up stroking it. A warm, sleep-heavy contentment radiated from his mind to hers.

"If that droid even thinks about tricking me again, I _will_ destroy her," Ben muttered matter-of-factly.

Figures he would be cranky about not getting to be in terrible pain on one of the best days of their lives. One thing Rey had learned over the past few years, was that you could coax the boy out of the Dark Side, but you could never fully take the Dark Side out of the boy. Experiencing your pain to the fullest was a hallmark of the Dark Side. Within the Dark Side of the Force, pain was a source of power. Meaning that sometimes, Ben's priorities were still absolutely whack.

Luckily, Leia knew this as well as Rey did, so when she arranged their stay at this luxurious private clinic, she had given explicit instructions not to leave her son to wallow in unnecessary pain if they could at all help it. Ben no longer took it out on the rest of the universe, so Rey didn't often begrudge him indulging in his element a little. She even agreed to slap him around in bed on a semi-regular basis. But even he usually agreed that he may have been overdoing it a little once he was no longer busy wildly overdoing it. Rey would remind him of that later.

Rey would _never ever_ let him live down the fact that he had tried to do his cresh-section delivery without anaesthesia.

During the surgery, they had been separated by a privacy screen and a noise-cancelling field to spare spectators the gory sights and sounds of the procedure, and a wall of blaster-proof glass to protect parent and baby while they were most vulnerable. Rey hadn't seen or heard so much as _felt_ it the moment the medidroid finally got to administer some painkillers. Suddenly, Ben's fevered, pseudo-meditative attempts at concentration had fractured with irate distraction, a crack of lightning compared to his increasingly shaky grasp on the pain and the low-level irritant of the droids' constant questions. And then, confronted with the reality of what he'd just agreed to and knowing it was too late to take it back, his whole mind had gone unfocused and fuzzy around the edges, with a woozy center of pure murder.

The droids had all the legally required bodily autonomy programming, but they were also fully equipped to take advantage of the stupid things organics were prone to shouting while in labor to save them from their own monumentally idiotic decisions. Labor, or whatever you called it when the whole point of it was physically impossible.

Rey had spent the rest of the delivery, as well as the baby's examination in the other room afterwards, firmly impressing _'don't break anything or anyone'_ onto Ben. She suspected she was going to spend a lot of time in the near future trying not to laugh about it.

"Good thing you can't read droid minds, then," she said, unworried. "Ateyfore said the baby is healthy."

"We already knew that."

"And that the sex is female."

"We already knew that."

Technically, they'd known she would grow up to have the mind of a girl, which didn't _necessarily_ mean anything about her biology – especially given her odd conception. With parents like them, who knew _what_ her internal sex organs were going to do once she entered puberty. Once upon a time, Leia had also been told that baby Ben was biologically male in the human sense of the word, end of. And look where that had gotten them.

But details, details. They'd already spent long enough boggling over the coincidence that somewhere in _both_ of their untraceable but definitely very heavily mammalian family trees, there had been a successful inclusion of the same egg-laying species of alien.

"I want to keep the scar," Ben said, which somehow didn't surprise Rey at all. Laid out naked like this, all his old war-wounds were on display. As gruesome as it was to imagine the medidroids methodically cutting his guts open behind the privacy screen, this wouldn't leave the mark of yet another mistake. In some cultures, sentients commemorated their experiences and accomplishments with ink or heat or precise, careful carvings. Ben, he cut his bacta treatments a little short and let the consequences of his actions etch themselves into his skin.

As scars went, this one would be wonderful.

"Okay. I'll help you out of the bath later."

"I can get myself out of the bath. You just need to wake me up on time," he said. He shot her a tired, annoyed look, before sighing and closing his eyes. "Those painkillers were entirely unnecessary."

"You know going into shock because you were too distracted by the baby to channel the Force properly wouldn't have made the occasion more special, right? Just let yourself have nice things, Ben. The Dark Side will still be there when they wear off."

He made a wordless noise of _'whatever'_ in the back of his throat. With a mental nudge to her, he curved his hand along the base of their egg. She happily complied and laced their fingers together.

Rey was biased, of course, but creamy white and speckled with faded blues and reds, their baby's shell was the prettiest thing she'd ever seen. Once she hatched, they were going to clean and preserve it for sure.

"You're carrying the next one," Ben announced drowsily.

"The next one?"

"We've done it once now, might as well keep going. You know how lonely being an only child is. _Our_ daughter should have a sibling to play with and to keep her company when we inevitably fuck up."

Rey had no problem laughing. There was no heat or hurt behind his words at all. They'd spent long enough feeling terrified and inadequate and hating themselves. They'd wasted enough time clinging to their past mistakes. No more of that today.

"Pregnancy is terrible, but it's _amazing_. You should really experience this some day," Ben went on, burrowing his face into her thighs. His words were starting to slur together. "The pain wasn't terrible, that was fine, I mean what came before the contractions. Though your insides probably won't have to rearrange themselves as much, so that part might not be as hard on you... and you actually have an orifice for babies to come out of, that always helps hybrid fertility between species with wildly different sexual characteristics..."

"Okay, sweetheart, whatever you want," she said, interrupting his drugged rambling by running her free hand through his sweaty hair. She doubted he could actually get her pregnant when both of their bodies' first instinct had been for _her_ to impregnate _him_, but if he was serious about wanting a second child, she doubted he would complain about having to carry it again.

Probably reading her mind, Ben murmured: "It'll work. I sense it in the Force."

"If you say so," she murmured back, humoring him, and leaned down to kiss his cheek before he sank all the way down into the comfort of sleep.

She stroked the top of the egg and settled in to wait for their first child to hatch.


End file.
